Brezhnev's Folly: the Building of BAM And

1 Introduction The Project of the Century , the assessment of the Baikal-Amur Mainline Railway (BAM) and its effects on the Soviet Union trans- formedW radically. In , Leonid Brezhnev addressed the Seventeenth Kom- somol Congress: “The Baikal-Amur Railway will transform the cities and settlements of Siberia, the North, and the Far East into high-culture centers while exploiting the rich natural resources of those regions!”¹ By , however, the Moscow News told a different story: “What is the railway like today? It is in a state of ruin and desolation. Rarely does a train whistle disturb the surrounding silence. The stations are deserted. The passenger terminals, beau- tiful structures built from individual designs that were chosen in competi- tions, are neglected. The settlements built by envoys from various republics of the former USSR have fallen into decay. Each year the number of resi- dents dwindles—they keep scattering in all directions.”² The chasm of social and political change that these assessments bracket proved more vast than even the four thousand kilometers of harsh Siberian terrain traversed by one of the most ambitious public works projects ever conceived. The BAM was so important to the entire leadership of the Soviet © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. Union that it tirelessly poured massive resources into a project doomed to crumble almost immediately upon completion.³ The Soviet Union used the railway to bolster collective faith in the command-administrative system as well as to improve the economy. The personal influence of Brezhnev represented a strong force in the push to popularize the project. In its heyday, BAM represented the quintessential Soviet big engineering project, as the nation’s scientists, journalists, academics, and propagandists extolled the railway’s virtue as the USSR’s first step toward realizing a utopian society. BAM was the last example of Soviet “gigantomania”. Like its many predecessors it shared a massive allocation of human and material resources, a highly inefficient uti- lization of them, and a general disregard for any impact on the environment. The project represented the government’s attempt to exploit the USSR’s vast natural resources for propagandistic and economic reasons.⁴ As one in a long progression of Soviet colossal schemes that the party used to herald the accomplishments of state socialism, BAM was the final expression of post- Stalin Prometheanism, in which the conquest of nature through technology was seen as a panacea for various political, social, and economic problems.⁵ Although the project achieved little in terms of tangible accomplishments, the propaganda effort created by the Soviet state to cast BAM in a favorable light was one of the most significant, if not the greatest, achievement of the eighteen-year Brezhnev period.⁶ The resources employed to portray BAM as an epic victory of humankind over nature, a forum for ethnic cooperation, and a catalyst for the economic development of the USSR’s eastern reaches equaled and occasionally surpassed those used to build the railway itself. In fact, the propaganda system created to promote BAM touched the lives of more Soviet citizens than its actual construction. Interviews with BAM par- ticipants stress the propagandistic nature of BAM rather than its concrete accomplishments. Interestingly, although never publicly conceived as such by the state, the railway served as a place where Soviet youth could express themselves with relative freedom. This situation was the product of a number of factors. One was that the project’s great distance from the centers of state power in the European part of the Soviet Union and Moscow in particular allowed the BAM labor population the space to voice a number of taboo ideas. They could engage in behaviors that were antithetical to official Soviet notions of civil obedience. These behaviors included, but were not limited to, expressions of national identity from a variety of non-Russian ethnic groups that resided / Introduction: The Project of the Century © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. both inside and outside the Soviet Union, a voicing of environmentalist and ecological tendencies that in some cases exceeded the scope of what the state allowed, philosophies of women’s liberation and expressions of gender equal- ity, and even widespread participation in criminal activity ranging from petty theft to rape and murder. One of the most intriguing aspects of BAM is the stark contrast between the project’s public portrayal in official media outlets and the private impres- sions of the railway held by those who worked it. Among other things, this disparity reveals the regime’s fundamental lack of understanding of one of its most important constituencies—the next generation of Soviet youth, which the project was intended to motivate. Exploring the disparity between BAM propaganda and BAM reality deepens understanding of the social dynamics of the Brezhnev era and beyond. BAM was not simply a microcosm of the Soviet Union during this period; rather, it provided a venue in which behaviors and attitudes that defined public and private discourse throughout the Brezhnevian USSR were magnified to a considerable degree. As such, the history of the Brezhnev years generally and BAM specifically cannot be defined solely as products of an era of stagnation (zastoi), as some Gorbachev- era, post-Soviet, and Western observers have characterized it.⁷ The BAM project illustrates a multiplicity of dynamic tendencies that shaped this critical period in Soviet history. After the Bolshevik Revolution of and subsequent Russian Civil War, the newly created Soviet Union maintained the imperial-era emphasis on railway construction and added a new push to mobilize the populace toward achieving a common goal of constructing socialism.⁸ A series of ambitious undertakings drew international attention to the Soviet Union’s program of rapid industrialization. This was particularly true in the case of Magnitogorsk, a steel-making complex that was built in the southern Ural mountains from the late s to the mid-s.⁹ Describing Magnitogorsk, American socialist and Magnitogorsk welder John Scott remarked that “in Russia . the world’s most gigantic social experiment is being made—amidst a galaxy of picturesque nationalities, wondrous scenery, splendid architecture, and exotic civilizations.”¹⁰ The construction of Magnitogorsk provided the Soviet Union with a steel-producing capacity that soon rivaled those of the United States and Western Europe. An integral part of the authorized propaganda campaign behind the Magnitogorsk and other contemporary efforts was the official apotheosis of Stalin himself, in which the mass media portrayed the Soviet Introduction: The Project of the Century / © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. dictator as a modern-day Prometheus who successfully harnessed the power of nature for the good of all Soviet people.¹¹ During the Stalin years, such construction schemes as the Turkestano- Siberian Railway (commonly known as Turksib), the Moscow metro system, and the Belomor (White Sea) Canal in the northwestern part of the USSR closely integrated the country’s rail and water transport networks, albeit with substantial human and material costs that the Soviet government had no qualms in accepting.¹² Also during this period, the Dneprostroi dam and hydroelectric project brought flood control and cheap power while fostering a sense of inclusion among the thousands of young Soviet citizens who had tamed the wild Dnepr River with tractors and “socialist fire.”¹³ Each of these efforts helped to augment the Soviet Union’s industrial capacity and advance the careers of those Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) members who managed to avoid the Great Purges of the s and emerge as the country’s new leadership.¹⁴ Two of these surviving managers were young CPSU members Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev. The Khrushchev-era Virgin Lands Campaign, which sent young Soviet men and women to introduce mechanized agriculture to the republic of Kazakhstan and other areas of the USSR, pointed to the state’s sustained in- terest in extending its control over nature but represented a distinctly different type of mass mobilization project than the costly and ultimately successful en- deavors of the Stalin era.¹⁵ Although Turksib had successfully connected the burning deserts of Soviet Central Asia and the frozen tundra of Siberia, the Virgin Lands Campaign ran into difficulties after initially delivering bumper harvests from the steppe soils of Kazakhstan. In the mid-s, the state pro- moted Sibaral, a plan to redirect the paths of several major Siberian rivers to control flooding and provide water for the parched cotton fields of Soviet Central Asia. A number of fantastic schemes were proposed, including the use of nuclear weapons to reverse the flow of the Irtysh and Ob rivers in an effort to bolster the flow of the Amu Darya River, which leads to the Aral Sea.¹⁶ The government’s primary motivation for such a radical plan as Sibaral was that it could provide an economic stimulus for the USSR’s impover- ished Central Asian republics. By the mid-s, however, a series of techni- cal glitches and environmental concerns doomed the project, and the state officially abandoned Sibaral during the late Gorbachev years.¹⁷ Long before BAM came to be known as the “Project of the Century,” ear- lier projects of Russia’s imperial and Soviet eras laid the groundwork for / Introduction: The Project of the Century © 2009 University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. Brezhnev’s folly. BAM’s legacy begins with the construction of the tsarist Trans-Siberian Railway in the late nineteenth century. Begun in , the original route of what would eventually become the ,-mile Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in during the Russo-Japanese War.¹⁸ With the outbreak of World War I in , the tsarist government relocated the rail- road around the southern shore of Lake Baikal beginning in as a replace- ment for the Trans-Siberian Railway’s original and vulnerable course through northwestern Manchuria.

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